[malgorithms]

There are so many conveniences around a global team name. Any time we played through the mental exercise of ambiguous names, it led us back to the deep pains of reading out loud security codes or fingerprints, or relying on some kind of hard-to-use web of trust around trusting people and then their vouching for teams. (note people, too, have unique names.)

With our testers, I've already had so many conversations about team names. If it's an in-person conversation it's validated entirely without looking anything up. If it's digital over an alternative medium - then the sharer doesn't have to go look up their team's identifier in order to talk about it. Everything is easier.

Also, I'm not that cynical by nature, but I've had a lot of conversations with people about security since we started Keybase. People don't check codes. From encrypted chats to SSH server fingerprints (ugg!) -- people don't check them. If a team name can be equivalent to one, but the cost is that the space is limited, it's worth it.

I guess in summary: why is a name better than a fingerprint? It can be memorized without effort. It can be visually or verbally reviewed without effort. And it often has meaning.

[rcthompson]

> [A name] can be visually or verbally reviewed without effort.

Have you considered the possibility of typo-squatting, look-alike Unicode characters, and other such tricks (basically all the same tricks people use for domain names)?

[another-dave]

One option could have been to use top-level domains for a team (e.g. add a TXT record to prove ownership of 'example.com' and then you can create that the 'example.com' team).

Out of interest, is there a reason you didn't go for that? Would be easy to memorise and validate while also ensuring uniqueness. Feels like it could also play in quite nicely with letting people on-board — e.g. you could have a feature that anyone with an email address in my domain is allowed to join the main team without needing admin approval.

That said, this sounds great — can't wait to try it out :)

[azag0]

Potentially, they could still roll this out, because a dot, ".", is currently not an allowed character in a team name.

[chias]

That's because it's used to designate sub-team (e.g. companyname.infosec is a sub-team to companyname)

[tokenizerrr]

And how will you deal with squatting? I am looking forward to holding all the popular names hostage.

[Deadolus]

Seems like they limit the number of teams you can create [per user] to 101. I guess it's the same dilemma as with domain names again.